The waves can be breaking on the shore. The new play can be breaking even. But the bottle has to break suddenly, not be breaking suddenly. Implies it took a long time, or at least a measurable time, to break.

I think the sentence would be odd without the phrase "all of a sudden". To me the oddness comes from two things:(1) Grammatical style: the expletive construction "there was" makes the sentence unnecessarily wordy. The subject of the sentence follows the verb, and there is no reason to shift emphasis away from the subject.(2) semantic: bottles don't break themselves. In M56's other examples the subject is doing the action expressed by the verb. I think the following is OK. What do you think?"all of a sudden, a bottle was being broken (by Bob) on the table." or "All of a sudden. Bob was breaking a bottle on the table."

Other than being written in the passive voice, which can kill any sentence, the sentence is mediocre, at best. Try "The bottle on the table broke." The adverb "suddenly" weakens the sentence. After all, how can a bottle break slowly?

It is passive voice. Passive voice is one of the least noticed grammatical errors. However, the breaking of a bottle is instantaneous, and almost never has a present tense. If it did, it would sound like:

All of a sudden, a bottle is breaking on the table.

Yet while the speaker says that, the act has already occured. Therefore, it is almost ALWAYS referred to in the past tense.

Wait a minute, now. While it is certainly likely the the true intent was to use "broke", it is not ungrammatical with "breaking". Consider this scenario: The bottle was sitting on a table for years and years, unmolested. Then, all of a sudden, without any explanation, a crack developed on the mouth of the bottle. The crack grew and grew over the course of many hours, even spawning new cracks. Eventually, the bottle was so badly damaged that it flew apart into a million pieces, each piece developing its own cracks. Couldn't this situation be accurately described by the sample sentence?